The Sex Beast (A True Crime Short)

Dr. Katherine Ramsland

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In Brief

Killers had a way of shocking people during the 1950s. They appeared suddenly, from out of nowhere, to assault men, women, and children who tried to lead upright lives

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Overview

The father lay in the ditch, hands bound in front of him, face savagely bludgeoned. A gruesome sight, but even veteran cops were not prepared for what they saw when they lifted him up: the body of an infant, dressed in a red-and-white pinafore. The baby had been tossed into the ditch alive. She had suffocated when her father’s body was pushed on top of her.

The man’s wife and another daughter were missing for two years. After they were found nearly a hundred miles away, it was clear that the killer’s motive was sexual. The father and the baby were quickly discarded. The real prize had been the wife. Her body bore a silk stocking knotted around the neck in an odd-looking harness and her knees were bruised. Police believed she had been ordered to perform a sexual act and had refused, so her killer used a collar to make her do what he wanted. She appeared to have been bludgeoned and hanged, and her little daughter had been beaten to death.

This area had been linked to an earlier murder with one suspect, but he had passed a polygraph exam. He was intelligent, educated, mild-mannered, and self-assured.

As this case grew more complicated, with more murders linked to a single predator, the emerging motive baffled even the most experienced detectives.

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Books don’t tell the whole story of the man called the “Sex Beast.” At most, serial killer encyclopedias provide brief summaries of his crimes. Frequently, these summaries contain glaring mistakes and omissions about his crimes and his life, as well as erroneous items, which are corrected in this eBook for the first time. The Sex Beast was quite intelligent, educated, and gifted musically, playing several instruments professionally. Quite unique as a serial killer, he was an intellectual, well-versed in the works of Sartre, Camus, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche.

He embraced Sartre’s belief that the choices one makes define his or her identity. Unfortunately, the ideas that he borrowed from Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky convinced him that murder is acceptable for an extraordinary person who can define his or her own moral values. He saw himself as such a person and suggested to a friend that he wanted to experience the killing of a human being. In retrospect, one can deduce that his views on rape, torture, and murder were similar to his views on killing, because those were the experiences by which the Sex Beast defined himself.

In the end, however, he had much more reprehensible motivations.

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About Dr. Katherine Ramsland

Dr. Katherine Ramsland, a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, has published more than 1,000 articles and 40 books, including The Forensic Psychology of Criminal Minds, The Human Predator, Inside the Minds of Serial Killers, and the Mind of a Murderer. She holds graduate degrees in forensic psychology, clinical psychology, criminal justice, and philosophy, and teaches forensic psychology and criminal justice at DeSales University in Pennsylvania. Ramsland has worked with prominent criminalists, coroners, detectives, and FBI profilers. She speaks internationally about forensic psychology and serial murder, and has appeared on numerous documentaries, as well as The Today Show, 20/20, 48 Hours, Larry King Live and E! True Hollywood Story.